Jessica Danielle Cunningham says she overdosed on heroin in the back seat of her best friend’s car in 2012, then woke from a coma to learn she was four weeks pregnant with the daughter she would later call her miracle baby.
The 32-year-old, who appeared on season 3 of 16 & Pregnant when she and then-boyfriend Jamie were expecting their first child, recounts the experience in an exclusive clip from ID’s Hollywood Demons: Surviving 16 & Pregnant. Cunningham says the overdose came after years of drug use that began when she was 17, after someone shot her up with heroin.
“I just started partying. And then all of a sudden pills started going into the parties and we're doing Xanax, and then it was Percocet, and when I was 17, I had somebody shoot me up with heroin,” Cunningham says in the clip. She says that in 2012 she got a bag of heroin and overdosed while the two were headed to McDonald’s in the early morning hours.
Cunningham says her friend refused to call police and drove her straight to the hospital instead, because Narcan was not widely available the way it is now. “By the time I got to the hospital, I was black and blue, and they're saying I was gonna be brain dead,” she says. Doctors told her she would be brain dead, but she later woke up from the coma to find her family surrounding her.
The timing of what happened next is what gives the story its force. Cunningham says she and Jamie then learned they were expecting another child, and she was only four weeks pregnant with her daughter. “I just overdosed with one kid. That's a rough one,” she says. “Luckily, she is the most beautiful girl,” and “is my miracle baby.”
Cunningham’s account lands against the backdrop of how many 16 & Pregnant stars have described difficult lives after the MTV series. She says she also faced brutal criticism after her appearance on the show. But in her telling, the overdose that nearly killed her also marked the end of heroin use: Cunningham says she never touched it again after that hospital trip. In 2013, she and Jamie welcomed their daughter, Jayleigh.
